Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/other_voices/page/60/)
Degradation & Grime, Abundance & “Good Breeding” Bechukotai 2 2011
How do we respond when confronted with the impact of degradation on people? Political correctness seems to demand that because people are of a minority we must never speak about their faults, which can’t be right.
Why the 2012 elections are likely to be the most racist that most of have seen in our lifetimes.
Noam Chomsky offered some interesting reflections on the environment during a speech at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, last September.
Whenever I talk publicly about the way that right-wingers in the Jewish world make it hard for other Jews to speak out against Israel, I’m challenged by some who insist that there is no such climate of repression in the Jewish world. Yet over and over again, I’ve encountered people who have taken Tikkun-like stances, both pro-Israel and pro-Palestine, and paid a high price for it. The impact of the Tony Kushner incident, described below, is not that it will silence Kushner–he has enough social power to resist this kind of attempt to silence him since as the author of Angels in America he has received so much public praise he is not in danger–but that it, like so many other similar acts of repression, gives a stark warning to younger or less economically secure people in academia, the media and in professional lives that they must keep their mouths closed about Israel or face dangers to their careers and futures. Two recent pieces about this incident are particularly worth reading: “CUNY Board Nixes Honorary Degree For Playwright Tony Kushner” in the Jewish Week by Doug Chandler and Tony Kushner’s response to the the CUNY Board Decision. Doug Chandler writes:
In what is believed to be a rare move, the City University of New York has turned down a request by one of its colleges to honor Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner at its commencement ceremony this spring, The Jewish Week has learned.
Chris Hedges’ recent article “The Corporate State Will Continue its Inexorable Advance Until We’re Locked into a Permanent Underclass” is brilliant in its insights. Unfortunately, like most of what Hedges is writing these days, it is missing any picture of hope or possibility. The very existence of constituencies for his thinking, like those who read Tikkun, belies the extreme pessimism and shows that his analysis is too one-sided, ignoring all the factors that have produced him and produced us and produced the tens of millions who voted for Obama precisely because we falsely believed that he would articulate and fight for an alternative to the reality that Hedges so clearly explicates. Because his analysis leaves all of us out of the picture, it is not only depressing but one-sided and therefore inaccurate. And yet, it does describe the massive reality we face and gives us a very good picture of why we are in the mess we are in.
President Obama has done a major disservice to the American people by accepting the right-wing premise that cutting budgets in order to lower the deficit should take priority over creating jobs.
Note from Rabbi Michael Lerner: We at Tikkun hate violence from whatever source, so naturally we’ve been extremely critical of Hamas through the years both for its violence and its glorification of violent acts of terror against Israeli civilians. We’ve similarly been critical of Israeli violence which is built into the very structure of the Occupation. And we’ve similarly been critical of the U.S. , Russia, China, Iran, Syria, Libya, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and the list goes on and on. But we also critiqued the Israeli government and the US for demanding that Palestinians become more democratic, then after Hamas won a popular election in 2006, rejecting any negotiations with a government that had Hamas as part, a decision which helped precipitate the split between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. Just as I supported negotiations with the Vietcong and North Vietnam to end the War in Vietnam, so I believe it is appropriate to negotiate with your enemies (not just the ones you approve of) if you really want to end a war and end violence.
Editor’s Note: I received this information from a homeless woman named Bobbie. It reminds us of why the GMP is so important and why the budget reductions of help to those suffering from poverty is such an immoral reality. “Poverty is the worst form of violence.” –Mohandas Gandhi
NEED VS SUPPLY
Funding
•In 1978, HUD’s budget was over $83 billion. •In 1983, HUD’s budget was only $18 billion. Demolition
• In the last several years, HUD has been tearing down thousands of low-income units across the country. • From 1996 on, HUD has spent $0 on building low-income housing while thousands of units have been demolished.
Crossposted from Hitzei Yehonatan. “You Shall be Holy, for I the Lord am Holy”
A commentary on the first sentence of the Torah portion that might literally be translated as Holies or Holy Ones. A friend of mine and loyal reader of these pages, Rabbi David Greenstein of Montclair New Jersey, was disconcerted by a remark I made a few weeks ago (Metzora, Supplement II) in which I stated that “Holiness is somehow connected in Jewish thought and in halakhic thought with separation, with making distinctions, drawing boundaries.” He argued, citing Sha’arei Yosher by R. Shimon Shkopf (a major Lithuanian Talmudist of the late 19th and early 20th century, who developed a philosophy of the underlying principles of Jewish law), that the holiness demanded of us is not “to distance ourselves from permitted enjoyments… but that the purposeful goal of our lives [is that] all our service and toil should always be dedicated to the good of the collectivity, that we not avail ourselves of any act or movement, benefit or enjoyment unless it have some aspect that is for the benefit of those other than ourselves.”
Whether intentionally or not, my friend raised the same question as is implied by a well-know midrash on the first verse of this week’s parasha, which warns against confusing Divine holiness and human holiness. In Leviticus Rabbah 24.9 we read:
אמר ר’ שמעון בן לקיש… “קדושים תהיו”. יכול כמוני? תלמוד לומר: “כי קדוש אני ” – קדושתי למעלה מקדושתכם. The Torah states: “You shall be holy [for I the Lord your God am holy]” (Lev 19:2). Is it possible [that you be holy] like Myself? Scripture states: “For I am holy.” My holiness is above your holiness. God is by His very nature utterly different from human beings or, as Rudolf Otto puts it, “Wholly Other”: His holiness transcends the corporeal world, and He dwells in realms far beyond our comprehension, let alone our ability to participate therein. Hence, when the Torah speaks of human beings, or specifically Jews, as being called upon to be holy, or even to emulate God’s holiness, it refers to something utterly different in nature than God’s holiness—and it is this which Rav Shkopf, and my friend, had in mind. Our midrash does not provide any positive definition of what human holiness is, but suffices with stating the radical difference between Divine holiness and human holiness. However, from the continuation of our parashah and the laws contained in the chapter that follows this general statement, one may infer that it means caring for one’s fellow man, behaving in an ethical manner, and creating an ethical society based, not only on decent behavior, but on loving and generous attitudes towards others. (Verses 5-8, which are concerned with ritual issues of consuming the flesh of a zevah offering within a certain period of time, are a kind of exception that proves this rule, and one might well ask what these verses are doing here—but that is a question for another time.)
An interesting insight into this idea is provided by Rav Yehudah Ashlag in one of the essays in his book Matan Torah (brought to my attention by another friend, Professor Emeritus Yehuda Gellman). Ashlag speaks there of the purpose of human life generally and the reason for Creation, beginning with the statement that it is the very nature of God to give. God needs nothing for Himself; He is infinite and omnipotent, and is in any event incorporeal and without the needs of flesh and blood. Hence, his nature is to give; the Creation of the universe was, so to speak, an expression of His need to give, to have someone to love.
Any doubt about how the United States makes its policies on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should be dispelled by the Obama administration’s near-instant reaction to the Fatah-Hamas reconciliation announcement: it is determined to be fully in sync with Prime Minister Netanyahu.
What Israel and the Palestinians really need from the US and the Quartet is some parameter-setting.
Reposted from the Progressive Christian Alliance. American motivational speaker Denis Waitley said, “There are two primary choices in life: to accept conditions as they exist, or accept responsibility for changing them.” I am convinced that Rabbi Jesus refused to accept the conditions of the corruption of Judaism by the Temple rulers. He also refused to accept the brutality of the Roman occupation. In these refusals he accepted the responsibility to try to change those conditions for the better and especially for the benefit of the poor and exploited. In this process Rabbi Jesus set his face to go to Jerusalem.
Please listen to it at http://www.jewintraining.com/
Leigh Marz began a yearlong process of converting to Judaism in 2004. In preparation for Leigh’s conversion ceremony her “Jew coach” (as Leigh calls him) asked her to share a written summary of her experience with guests. “A written paragraph or two should do it,” he suggested. What seemed a simple task became a brief obsession and led to the writing of Tales of Jew In Training. In preparation for the ritual, Leigh made each guest a handbound copy.
Sleepwalking into the Imperial Dark
This can’t end well. But then, how often do empires end well, really? They live vampirically by feeding off others until, sooner or later, they begin to feed on themselves, to suck their own blood, to hollow themselves out. Sooner or later, they find themselves, as in our case, economically stressed and militarily extended in wars they can’t afford to win or lose. Historians have certainly written about the dangers of overextended empires and of endless war as a way of life, but there’s something distant and abstract about the patterns of history. It’s quite another thing to take it in when you’re part of it; when, as they used to say in the overheated 1960s, you’re in the belly of the beast. I don’t know what it felt like to be inside the Roman Empire in the long decades, even centuries, before it collapsed, or to experience the waning years of the Spanish empire, or the twilight of the Qing dynasty, or of Imperial Britain as the sun first began to set, or even of the Soviet Empire before the troops came slinking home from Afghanistan, but at some point it must have seemed at least a little like this — truly strange, like watching a machine losing its parts. It must have seemed as odd and unnerving as it does now to see a formerly mighty power enter a state of semi-paralysis at home even as it staggers on blindly with its war-making abroad. The United States is, of course, an imperial power, however much we might prefer not to utter the word. We still have our globe-spanning array of semi-client states; our military continues to garrison much of the planet; and we are waging war abroad more continuously than at any time in memory. Yet who doesn’t sense that the sun is now setting on us?
Here are some reflections from Christian thinkers on Easter From Rev. Brian McLaren’s blog (Rev. McLaren is one of the most exciting contemporary Christian theologians):
Holy Week: Meditation 7 … Easter
Fr. Richard Rohr celebrates the holy resurrection of the Lord like this:
Christ Crucified is all of the hidden, private, tragic pain of history made public and given over to God. Christ Resurrected is all of that private, ungrieved, unnoted suffering received, loved, and transformed by an All-Caring God. How else could we believe in God at all?